How Blockchain Will Change HR Forever

Ashik Ahmed
, ContributorI am on a mission to improve the lives of shift workers.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Blockchain is about to revolutionize our way of doing business, but probably not in the way that you think. While it is most closely associated with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology is primed to disrupt a whole lot more than currency.

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Blockchain is about to revolutionize our way of doing business.

Blockchain’s decentralized network of computers verifies and automates the flow of information. That makes it a trustworthy system that stores data while cutting out the middleman. This is the reason that banks are working to stay abreast of blockchain—and also why it could completely disrupt the way HR professionals work.

If we fully utilize blockchain’s capabilities, the technology will create more accurate and effective approaches to just about everything in HR. From big-picture areas like hiring and taxes to smaller scale tasks like payroll, there are so many important human resources applications that blockchain will change.

Blockchain will make resumes and LinkedIn obsolete

It might seem like an outlandish statement today, but blockchain technology is perfectly capable of making both old-school resumes and career networking websites like LinkedIn obsolete. Instead of an applicant writing up a description of where they’ve worked and what they’ve done, blockchain transactions will simply store all of their employment history.

That will totally transform the way that companies recruit candidates. There will be no need for a lengthy verification process where HR offices call references to confirm employment history. They can simply pull up the public blockchain. It’s even possible that the blockchain can store performance indicators like whether the employee was promoted or the reason why they left the company.

Having this complete picture readily available will take a lot of the subjectivity out of the hiring game. We won’t adjust our resumes or alter how we present ourselves based on the specific job we’re applying to. Blockchain can document both our successes and failures, encouraging us to embrace those failures and what we’ve learned from them instead of just leaving them out. Most importantly, a more complete picture will help companies make better decisions and allow strong performers to rise to the top.

If LinkedIn does continue to exist, its main value add will be in the form of a nicer user interface that makes blockchain technology easier to navigate. The employment history and “content,” however, will all be pulled from the public blockchain.